


the raven under my bed

by wallakoala



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Bluesey - Freeform, College AU, F/M, M/M, pynch - Freeform, thanks Stiefvater, well I guess I've been sucked back into this dark hole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 02:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7148813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallakoala/pseuds/wallakoala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Ronan Lynch,” the boy grinned, proffering a hand like a taunt. “Welcome home, honey.”</i>
</p>
<p>Struggling to make rent his first summer at University, Adam takes on an enigmatic new roommate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Ranger

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this article: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/straight-guy-worries-hes-homophobic-gay-roommate-ends-falling-love/#gs.Hpo6sRI
> 
> I would like to dedicate this inaugural fic to my roommate Rebecca, who read the Raven Cycle while they were checked out under my name and said she would probably read the fic if I wrote it. 
> 
> Honestly feeling like a dirty old man getting back into fanfiction after a ten year hiatus, but that just speaks to how much this series broke me inside. Enjoy!

With one innocuous swipe of his debit card, Adam Parrish’s bank account dipped to a lethal two-digit balance. It was the second day of summer. Sordid rolls of steam rose from the sidewalks outside; the thermostat read 98 degrees in the marshy Virginia heat.The Target clerk furrowed his brow at the way Adam snatched back his card, fingers frantic and sweaty, but made no comment. 

 

_ Maybe I can ask Henry for an advance _ . But the idea of asking felt too close to begging, and it had been Henry who’d necessitated the buying of this stupid notebook and tape recorder in the first place.

 

“You never take any notes, man,” Henry had quipped, fussily adjusting the spiked tide of hair in the center of his head. His recent promotion to editor in chief had amply inflated his already formidable ego. “I don’t care how good your memory is, you’ve got to make the interviewee think you’re paying attention. They’re like sheep, they like to be fussed over. Get a notebook. And a tape recorder, while you’re at it. Take yourself to the  _ next level, _ fake it til you make it, you know what I’m saying?” And thus, one visit to the local Target and a killing blow to his bank account later, Adam Parrish (student journalist extraordinaire) was ready to take on what Henry called a Story, with a capital S.

 

The assignment: an expose on the internal workings of the Paranormal Activities Club on campus. 

 

Also known as: Adam’s punishment turning in his last two articles late. Also known as: a freak show of conspiracy theorists, wannabe satan worshippers, and people who did too much yoga. 

 

Adam had many ideas of an acceptable way to spend the second night of his summer, and this was not one.

 

Adam hefted his Target bag and braced himself before stepping into the sticky embrace of the heat outside the sliding doors. His bike leaned dejectedly against a wall, ready to melt all over the sidewalk. First, he would ride it back to the run-down apartment he was renting for the summer session and scrub this day from his body with a cold shower. Then he would microwave some Easy Mac, the gourmet of the starving student, and head out to campus.

 

The Target bag’s handles were carefully looped around the bike handles. A swear was dropped as searing metal met the inside of a bare leg. And then Adam was pedaling furiously homeward.

 

\--

 

“But is choice really inevitable? If I get a tarot reading today, and say--say the psychic predicts that my brother is going to die. So I take a bunch of measures to keep him out of harm’s way, make sure he gets a checkup at the doctor’s, all that shit. And then the doctor accidentally jabs some material artery while he’s giving him an immune shot and he dies. If I hadn’t ever meddled with the reading would the same outcome still have happened?”

 

This bit of brilliance from an acne-scarred Paranormal member whose nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS Prokopenko, sweating under the fluorescent lights of the basement classroom they’d convened in.

 

Adam was curled in the back with his legs propped on a desk, his blinking tape recorder a reassuring set of ears as he let his own mind wander. Dust motes sparkled in the half light, plankton in the sea of suburbia. The room was filled with the usual suspects--at least five girls wearing funeral dresses and one boy in the same attire, a pudgy blue-haired punk who was furiously scribbling in a notebook and casting suspicious glares in Adam’s direction, the aforementioned Prokopenko, and a smattering of bored students in hoodies who appeared to only be there for the free air conditioning. 

 

Adam’s eyes scanned the room from left to right and rested on the back of an aggressively shaved head. It belonged to a boy who lounged apart from the others, vein-laced arms dangling casual yet predatory on the backs of chairs which flanked him like cronies, jiggling one black boot where it was crossed over his knee. Purposefully separatist, like Adam himself. 

 

“You have to admit, it’d be pretty damn ironic if he died getting an immunity shot. The anti-vaxxers would have a field day,” the shaved lone ranger drawled at Prokopenko. His sarcasm held all the sleeping venom of a cobra. Adam’s ears perked. A devil’s advocate had real potential to make the night bearable. 

 

Prokopenko squinted into the gloom, trying to focus in on the naysayer. “You new here?”

 

“First time. Figured this was cheaper than paying for the movies,” the ranger planted both his feet on the ground and rubbed the stubble at the back of his neck. “I love a good comedy.” 

 

“This isn’t some kind of a joke, shitbag,” Prokopenko’s face collapsed into anger like a deflated souffle. “The supernatural isn’t all Tinkerbells and Narnia closets. If you’re going to stick around, you’ve got to show some respect.”

 

Adam felt himself willing the shaved boy to turn around. In the half light he could see the twist of sinews under the bare skin of his arms, and the inky tips of a tattoo poking over the collar of his T-shirt. Irrationally Adam felt a thrill of fear go down his back. For a short second, he wondered if he was hoping to see the face of the devil.

 

The boy turned. Eyes overflowing with sky, and a jagged mouth like a faultline. His face simmered with contradiction, wild and calm, furious and hopeful. Reflexively Adam flicked the switch to turn off his tape recorder just as the boy looked straight at him. Salty sweat dripped down his temple.

 

“Well, then. I guess I’ll leave you kids to your games. Don’t stay up too late.” The ranger flashed Prokopenko a wide grin, and sauntered out the door with his hands in his pockets.

 

Adam stood abruptly just as the door swung shut. “Uh, that’s all I’ll be needing for tonight. Thanks for your time.” He made an awkward beeline for the door, eager to cast off Prokopenko and his ilk like an old and rather irksome jacket. His fingers quavered like winter leaves as his heart beat  _ fire, fire, fire. _

 

\--

 

Half an hour later, Adam fumbled with his key outside his apartment in the thin light of the landing. He could never keep track of which was for the journalism office, or for the storage unit he was paying through his teeth for, or for the autoshop tool shed, or for Nino’s pizzeria back door. 

 

Just as he managed to jam the correct key into the lock, his peeling front door swung open from the inside. The shaved ranger from the meeting stood silhouetted in the doorway, one curled hand still on the knob. “Oh,” he blinked. “It’s you.”

 

Unexpectedly primal fury surged through Adam’s bones, fight or flight, fight, fight, fight. How the hell had this bastard found out where he lived and had enough time to break and enter before Adam even got home? Briefly it occurred to him that he might have interrupted a robbery, but the thought was curiously absent of fear. “What the hell is this?” Adam’s voice seethed, horrifying in its resemblance to his father’s.

 

The ranger shrugged, no shred of remorse. “This lock is corroded halfway to the afterlife. I barely leaned on the door and it open-sesamed. You should tell your landlady.”

 

Adam ground his teeth, clutching his messenger bag tightly to his body. God he hated power plays, the nonchalant comments of the puppeteer who held all the strings and knew it. He’d grown up being the puppet. “I’ll be sure to let her know. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you stepped out of my living space before I call the police.”

 

No reaction. Adam swallowed. Think.  _ What would Blue do?  _ “My roommate is going to be home soon.” 

 

He had no roommate, but concern for his safety was beginning to set in. Maybe the chances of being serial murdered went down if there was a potential witness.

 

“Roommate,” the shaved boy scoffed. “He’s already home. You’re looking at him.”

 

Adam’s ears twitched with a buzzing noise like the drone of bees. Rage like magma cooled in his veins, rendering him numb and cold. “Sorry?”

 

“Ronan Lynch,” the boy grinned, proffering a hand like a taunt. “Welcome home, honey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully will update weekly :)   
> Next up: Blue returns home from studying abroad in Brazil and is met with a Situation.


	2. The Reunion

Blue Sargent’s cell phone was already ringing, and she’d barely stepped out of the boarding tunnel. 

Juggling a Totoro-shaped backpack and ungainly duffle, she fished the phone out of a side pocket and struggled to swipe the “answer” key. After twenty years living without a communication device, her new phone was still like a family of raccoons to Blue-- cute when viewed from afar but rather alarming up close.

“Adam?” she finally managed to answer, wincing as she dropped her duffle onto the floor and a thousand curated seashells from the Brazilian coast rattled in protest within. 

“How was the flight?” her best friend answered nonchalantly. 

“Flighty. A lot of babies. It’s like there were more infants in that cabin than in the whole city of Rio.” 

On the other end of the phone, Adam snorted. “Well, I still have yet to board a plane that you can’t operate with 25 cents at the playground, so check your privilege, Sargent.”

The barb was without venom. Adam had wanted freedom, craved it desperately, but to him it had meant anything outside the four metal walls of the trailer he grew up in, it had meant being walled in by skyscrapers while crammed into a dorm room while the minds of hundreds of PhDs slept nearby. The University of Virginia was enough for him, but it had never been what freedom meant to Blue. That was why the two had gone their separate ways for the previous year, Adam to continue his highly undeclared major (how could he pick just one, when the world was a fountain of knowledge?), Blue to study abroad and find the real forests that she had imitated with cardboard cutouts on her bedroom wall.

“Did you call to bring my attention to the rising socioeconomic disparity in this country, or was there something you actually needed? I’ve got to catch a taxi.” Blue adjusted the phone to her shoulder and hefted the duffle bag again.

“Say no more, your chauffeur awaits. Terminal B, right?” There was a fumbling crash and a swear, then the sound of a phone being picked up again. “Sorry. No Bluetooth in the Hybrid, so I’ve been balancing the phone on my leg.”

The Hybrid was what Adam ironically dubbed his car, a cyborg of old parts mashed together in an undecipherable mess to the human eye. Blue fought a smile of surprise. “You came to pick me up? But my flight was delayed by two hours! Have you been waiting here since 2?”

“There’s a surprising amount of sightseeing to do around the airport. Did you know, for example, that the ratio of black suitcases to every other color is about 5 to 1? I counted through the sliding doors while I was idling on the curb.” She could hear a shy smile through the phone.

Blue snorted. “Alright, Parrish, I’m coming.”

“Wait! Blue...would you bring me a box of chicken nuggets and some ranch? I skipped lunch.”

Blue eyed the curving McDonald’s line of fifty-odd people directly in front of her, and weighed it against the gastronomical well-being of her best friend. “The things I do for you, Adam. You’re going to want to pull over for a while.”

\--

When Blue emerged from the terminal, Adam was right outside the doors, a wide smile breaking on his tanned face. Blue wasn’t normally much for dramatic airport reunions, but this one time she shuffled forward and allowed herself to be swept into an enthusiastic hug, breathing in Adam’s familiar smell of clean laundry and motor oil.

“Good to have you back,” Adam mumbled, ruffling her hair. 

The two slid into the sizzling insides of the Hybrid and set off towards the university.The radio produced little more than threads of static, but their words bolstered the atmosphere in the car. Blue struggled to describe the sorts of butterflies and insects she had catalogued in her fieldwork, excitedly talked about taking additional courses with a Professor Gray who had heavily hinted he’d write her recommendation letters, and taught Adam some swear words in Portuguese. Adam quietly loaded french fries into his mouth, grinning widely at the good bits of the story and letting Blue run her course.

“But how’s life at the campus?” Blue asked as the car rolled through increasingly rural patches of highway. “I’ve been talking a lot.”

Adam pressed his mouth together in a half-grimace. “Well, I got a new roommate.”

“You say ‘roommate’ like ‘disease’.”

Adam snorted. “Ronan Lynch is a bit of a disease.”

Blue cocked her head curiously. She couldn’t decide if ‘Ronan Lynch’ sounded like a swear or a promise when it came from Adam’s mouth. “What, so he does well in petri dishes? Explain.”

Adam’s face wrestled with itself. “Well, for one, he’s a hoarder. And all of the shit he hoards is bizarre. I’m not saying rare collectibles. Like...he’s got a completely useless watering can where the spout points inwards, and a giant packet of sporks that become glowsticks when you bend them. It’s all over my bedroom, and I feel like the weird is starting to eat my life.”

Blue fought the urge to laugh. “Adam, you’ve seen my room, right? Are you expecting me to side with you if you’re speaking out against novelty collectors?”

Adam sputtered like a frustrated faucet. “That’s different! You’re into decorating because it’s how you make things Blue-y. Like...your cardboard trees, or the little clay dolls you made of the Arcade Fire members, it’s an extension of yourself. But Ronan Lynch just hoards these new-age kitsch objects and doesn’t care about any of them. He doesn’t have any emotional attachment to his stuff, it’s just there taking up space. My space.”

“Say his name again,” Blue ordered.

“Are you even--” Adam sighed. “Ronan Lynch.”

Blue nodded slowly and made a humming noise like a therapist reassuring her patient. “Alright. Go on. What else is disease-like about Ronan Lynch?”

Adam didn’t have to think long. It had been two weeks since Lynch’s surprise landing into his life, and each day had brought with it a creative new version of hell.

Day Three, Lynch brought back a live raven in a bird cage, and then let it fly out of the cage and leave droppings all over the room.

Day Six, Lynch burned toast and set off the fire alarm, triggering a building-wide evacuation while Adam was in the shower. He had frantically thrown on a towel and jogged out of the building, standing outside while several female tenants giggled at his scrawny, pale torso. 

But these things paled in comparison to Day Eight. Day Eight was Kavinsky.

“Well, Lynch is a Grade A asshole, but he has a Grade 100 asshole boyfriend who probably has received an oscar for best male lead in the role of Asshole.”

Blue laughed. “Does your heavy use of asshole imply that you saw one or both of theirs unexpectedly and that’s why you’re mad?”

Despite himself, Adam blushed. “Thankfully, no. But you would hate him too, Blue, I promise. HIs name is Joseph Kavinsky and he only wears tank tops. He leaves the last letter off of every word he pronounces, drag races his stupidly expensive car, and probably puts ‘vaping’ as a special skill on his resume. And I’m pretty sure the baked goods he brings over aren’t Betty Crocker brand. He’s fucking insufferable.” The f-bomb felt delightfully sour on his tongue. 

An hour before setting off for the airport, Adam had walked into the living room and interrupted Kavinsky caging Lynch in an aggressive kiss, full of fang and possessiveness. The sight made Adam physically ill. He put the image from his mind, unsure if his acid rage was tainted by the closed-minded beliefs held by his father.

“Let me meet him,” Blue demanded, fixing Adam’s profile with a stare. 

“Kavinsky? Or Lynch?”

“Both. Either.” Blue paused. “I’ll run them through a few tests.”

Adam’s long mouth quirked. The idea of unleashing Blue Sargent, feminist storm of one, onto the pair of demons living in his apartment did sound appealing. “What kind of tests?”

“You know, they might be awful roommates, but you can judge the decency of a guy pretty quickly. You take them to any restaurant and see how they treat the waiter. And if they pass the test...I’ll help you work things out. Trust me, my mom’s a licensed psychic.” Blue winked clumsily.

Adam laughed. “Fair enough, Sargent. I’ll take you up on it. Work your miracles.”

-

As Adam stood fumbling with his keys on his porch step, he felt curiously proud as Blue drank in the ramshackle state of his building without judgment or surprise. He was invincible, Blue as ready for war as a young Ares at his side.

The door inched open. Kavinsky was not on the couch, thankfully. But somebody else was.

A bespectacled boy in an unseasonably hot sweater was propped up reading a copy of The Secret History, every thread of his blue chinos and tick of his enormous watch spelling out wealth, wealth, wealth. Adam could have no more imagined this specimen reclining on his lopsided thrift sofa than the great Gatsby himself.

The boy looked up, startled, an actor caught out of character. “Oh, I’m sorry about this,” he coughed, voice suddenly smooth and unruffled. “Ronan didn’t mention that he had a roommate.” His eyes shifted to Blue, taking in her enormous feather earrings and rumpled boots. “Or two.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Adam agreed, voice cool. “Who’re you?” Kavinsky was truly maddening, but at least he was an evil Adam knew. This polished boy dripping cash from every syllable he spoke was something else entirely.

The boy was saved from answering as Ronan Lynch suddenly emerged from the hallway, an uncoiling of shadow into the light, tattoo visible over the curve of his black T-shirt collar. He scratched casually at the stubble on his head, looking back and forth between the couch reader and Adam. “Long-sticking thorn in my side, Dick Gansey, meet my cohabitator Adam Parrish.” 

“Just Gansey, please,” Gansey winced.

Ronan’s blue eyes sought out Adam’s brown. Adam met the stare, chin out. “He’ll be staying with us for a few,” Ronan said, a challenge in his tone.

“A few what, exactly?” Adam demanded.

Ronan ignored the query and instead glared at Blue, hackles raised. “Got a girlfriend, Parrish? She looks like a tropical bird.”

Blue seemed more amused than offended at the comparison. “I do actually thrive in the tropics, but we can get to know each other better over food. Anybody else want to get frozen yogurt? I’m starving.”

Gansey blinked in surprise, at a rare loss for what to do in this social situation. Adam and Ronan continued seething at each other for a few seconds longer. Ronan shrugged, brushing off the threat, infuriating Adam further. “Might as well. It’s hot as balls. But we’ll do ice cream, not yogurt. Low fat products are for--”

“--the wisely health-conscious?” Blue suggested cheerfully. She tugged at Adam’s arm. “Come on, then. There’s a good place two blocks down the street.”

Ronan smirked and shouldered past her out the door without further remark. Adam glanced once more at Gansey and then followed, frustration peeling off his shoulders. 

“Exeunt, pursued by bear,” Blue muttered under her breath, and flourished an arm at the door. “You coming?” she raised her eyebrows at Gansey.

Gansey blinked owlishly. “Er, yes. Yes I am.”

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Henry gives Adam an interesting assignment.


	3. The Flames

“Welcome. Welcome to the Lair, young padawan.” 

 

Henry Cheng’s disembodied voice wavered from the dark editor’s office. Adam groped for a light switch, recoiling as he touched a soft patch that felt suspiciously like day-old gum. The light sputtered and flicked on.

 

Henry was reclining with his Sperrys propped on his desk, back to Adam like the brooding villain of a bad 80’s crime film. Adam sighed. “So did you call me in at 7 AM on a Saturday just to stage a dramatic entrance, or was there something productive that needed to be accomplished?”

 

The chair swung around, and the crest of Henry’s tidal wave hair broke in a graceful swirl. “Alright, so I’ve got a scoop. And naturally, I can’t just hand this off to one of the interns. They’re sweet, but also incompetent little fish, you feel me? Nah, this called for a veteran. That’s where you come in.”

 

“Henry, we don’t have interns.”   
  


“We do since I hired one last week for course credit,” Henry grinned. “Noah! I know you’re over there. Get in here.”

 

From over Henry’s cubicle divider, Adam saw a flurry of papers explode into the air and heard a frantic scramble for purchase before somebody’s body hit the floor with a thud. “Sorry,” a small voice gasped. “You surprised me.”

 

A shrunken boy with wispy cotton hair and gaunt cheekbones crawled out from under the mess of scrap paper and met Adam’s eye. Definitely a freshman, Adam thought with faint disdain, though he himself had only just finished his first year. “I’m Noah,” the boy breathed, half-heartedly offering a hand to shake and then pulling it back before Adam could make contact.

 

“And now that you’re acquainted,” Henry cheerily flicked a pen through his fingers, “I’m going to explain the assignment.”

 

Adam blinked. “You...we’re working together? Me and him?” He glanced at Noah, who was now furiously trying to unknot his shoelace from around the leg of Henry’s desk.

 

“Two heads are better than one, and Noah here is really a top-notch copyeditor. Nothing gets by him,” Henry tapped his temple conspiratorily and Noah flushed. “Besides, you might want some backup for this one.”

 

“What, have they discovered a radioactive waste disposal unit under the engineering labs? Is the Dean accepting bribes? Oh, better yet, is he bribing somebody else? A senator, ideally?” Adam’s penchant for sarcasm was increasing with each day he spent with Henry, he found.

 

“Better.” Henry paused for dramatic effect and took a long drink from the coffee mug he had on the table, which Adam knew was actually filled with strong black tea. “One of the fraternities has been forcing its pledges to illegally set fires as part of its hazing activities, and there’s proof on tape! We can nail the bitches!” 

 

Henry’s face was glowing with his standard passion for activism and the improved life conditions of his peers. Adam’s insides suddenly felt dense as iron ore. “You’re saying,” he said slowly, “that you want me and er, Noah, to write an expose on lawbreaking and potentially dangerous arsonists? Why haven’t you just, I don’t know, called the police on them like a decent citizen?”

 

The heat in Adam’s voice glanced off Henry without making a mark. “Well, I wouldn’t say they’re dangerous. They were setting off fireworks; the fires were probably incidental. But the thing is, you have an IN, my friend. A real contact. A little birdie told me your new roommate is dating one of the members who was implicated in the video.”

 

Adam’s vision was rapidly clouding red, a phenomenon he had always assumed only applied to bulls and dramatic thriller writing. “Kavinsky. You want me to interview Kavinsky? Henry, what exactly have I ever done to you that you feel the need to go straight to capital punishment without trial or jury?”

 

Noah’s head wagged back and forth between Henry and Adam like he was spectating a particularly captivating ping pong match, mouth agape.

 

“Hey, Parrish, my compadre, my partner in crime! Don’t be like that. You are the only one who can make this happen. Sometimes the greater good depends on one man sacrificing his own well being. I’m sure there’s a relevant quote out there about it. We need somebody to give their opinion from the inside, it’ll give the expose some more heft. Make it look like we considered every side, you know.”

 

Well. On the off chance it might get Kavinsky thrown in prison…

 

Adam smiled grimly. “Alright. I’ll do it.”

 

\--

 

Blue Sargent sat across from Ronan Lynch, human disease, and Dick Gansey, walking wallet, in a corner table at the cheapest Mexican joint in town. 

 

When she had volunteered to take Ronan out to dinner, she’d imagined that Adam would be with her and Gansey would not. Blue also supposed, by her mother’s usual logic, life wouldn’t be very interesting if everything happened the way she imagined it would. 

 

Adam owed her. He’d agreed to come, promised to come, and then disappeared to the newspaper office early in the morning and never come back. Blue was already working up a passionate speech about him preying on her abandonment issues.

 

As it was, their order hadn’t even come yet (an enormous carnitas burrito heaped with red sauce for Ronan, a bowl of fajitas for Gansey, and one large horchata for Blue) and a cloud of social exhaustion was already settling over the table. Ronan had spent the last twenty minutes making lines of chili flakes on the table with a credit card and goading Gansey to snort it; Gansey had spent the last twenty minutes ignoring Ronan and trying, weakly, to find something in common with Blue. No takers, so far.

 

Gansey cleared his throat. “So, is Blue your real name?”

 

Blue raised her eyebrows. “In a world where kids are named Apple and Blanket, is Blue really so hard to believe? And you go by Gansey.”

 

Gansey smiled slightly, his polite-company face unfazed. “Well, Dick Gansey is a family name, rather unfortunately. I’m the third. They made me write out the Roman numerals on the SATs.”

 

“They say people used to get their names from their jobs or where they lived or what they looked like. Blacksmith. Redbeard.” Ronan glanced at Gansey and smirked. “Must be impressive, if they named your grandfather for his--”

 

Gansey cleared his throat cheerily. “Not at the table, Lynch.”

 

“What do you study here?” Blue interjected, watching as Ronan began piling the chili flakes into a tiny mountain. 

 

Ronan met her eyes over the table, his shoulders hunched in like a caged animal in his too-small chair, the swoop of his eyebrows the arch of a peregrine dive. “Agriculture and environmental studies,” he declared simply.

 

Gansey smiled slightly at the surprise on Blue’s face. “I don’t know if you can say you’re studying it when you never go to class,” he chided.

 

Ronan flicked a spray of pepper at Gansey. “I’m going to get as far away from this city as I can when I graduate. Till a patch of land, build a farm with two hands, raise animals under the open sky. Go to a place where I can go weeks without seeing another human being or smelling gas exhaust.” 

 

His voice was low and measured, unabashed, brimming with conviction as if reading facts from an almanac. 

 

“A place for stars and crickets,” Blue mused. She’d felt the same thing her whole life, yearning for the feel of waxy plants and many-legged insects on her arms. 

 

Ronan hummed in agreement. “Poetic. Not bad, maggot.”

 

Again, like when he’d called her a tropical bird, Blue felt more like Ronan was being affectionate than derogatory.

 

“I’ve never heard of a person who drives a BMW and only wears black dreaming of becoming a farmer,” she smiled.

 

“I’ve never seen a person who dresses like they jumped into a dumpster covered in sticky glue dreaming of becoming a botanist,” Ronan retorted, flashing a mouth of sharp teeth.

 

“Unkind, but touche,” Blue harrumphed. Rural Virginia where she’d grown up was sleepy-wild, the wrong kind of wild, fields of tame wildflowers and lazing animals; she had been itching to shed it like a skin for years and years. Suddenly, she felt in Ronan a kindred spirit not even Adam had been to her.

 

And when, at the end of the night, Ronan pushed away Gansey’s proffered bills and left a 50% tip to their harried waiter, Blue made her decision regarding the decency of Ronan Lynch.

 

\--

 

Joseph Kavinsky was sprawled across the couch without a shirt on, shades resting on his head despite the utter lack of sunlight in the room. He was the first thing Ronan saw when he entered the apartment.

 

Gansey, ever the gentleman, had volunteered to walk Blue home after their late lunch, at which point she had given him a lecture on the benefits of the death of chivalry and the fact that she was well able to take care of herself. Gansey then managed to make some excuse about her place being on the way to the supermarket, and Blue had supposed it was a free country, so Ronan was left to his own devices and one trespassing Kavinsky.

 

“Lynch,” Kavinsky drawled, a wide smirk spreading across his face. “How was the threesome dinner?”

 

“Stop sweating on my couch, asshole,” Ronan retorted, tossing his wallet onto the coffee table and going into the kitchen for a cold beer. He was feeling restless, jittery, the sort of mood that invited illicit drag racing and climbing onto campus roofs. It was Kavinsky who gleefully encouraged all these activities. Yet Ronan was feeling a severe drought of patience for Kavinsky today.

 

The open fridge felt good. Ronan pressed his forehead against the top shelf, thinking of a dream he’d once had where he’d been alone on the arctic tundra, nothing but stoic penguins and ice for miles around. It was one of the best things he’d ever dreamed. 

 

He smelled powerful cologne and charcoal a second before Kavinsky came up behind him and wrapped two wiry arms around his waist, then pushed his mouth against Ronan’s jawline, hands tugging his shirt up to grasp his stomach. “You kept me waiting,” he growled.

 

Ronan closed his eyes, shuddering. “I’m supposed to believe you’re just here for the pleasure of my company, dickhead?”

 

Kavinsky’s hands paused their journey across Ronan’s chest. “There’s another pledge run tonight. I thought you might want a real thrill, after dinner with Dick Van Dyke and the hippie.”

 

A pledge run. Code for more fireworks, flames, smoke rising in wreaths into the night. The screaming of the burned freshman who’d had half his hair singed off. The cackling of that paranormal activities freak as he filmed the whole thing for Youtube. Sickening. Ronan shrugged Kavinsky off with sudden disgust. “I thought you were done with that.”

 

Kavinsky and Ronan stared each other steadily in the face, fridge light casting a ghostly pallor on both boys, throwing their bodies into sharp statuesque relief. 

 

“Yeah, well, I also thought you weren’t a goddamn pussy,” Kavinsky finally said, a taunt in his voice. “Maybe your new roommate’s made you soft.”

 

“Nah, I’d say he actually makes me pretty hard,” Ronan grinned wickedly.

 

Kavinsky’s face contorted in anger for a second before he pulled the usual mask of unaffected coolness back over it. “You’re a real comedian, huh?”

 

“Jealous of a straight boy, are you?”

 

“Like fuck I am.” Kavinsky leaned forward until his mouth hovered at the corner of Ronan’s, reached an arm around and possessively slid his fingers into the waistband of Ronan’s dark jeans. “Let’s go. They’re starting in twenty.”

 

Faster than he thought he could move, Ronan shoved Kavinsky away and back against the counter, unable to stand the feel of his skin, invasive and close. “You know I’m not interested.”

 

Kavinsky rubbed his arm where it had hit the island, eyes flashing. Another beat of silence loud as hail. “Alright. I’ll go. But you’ll be back for more, Lynch. You always are.”

  
  


\--

 

When Adam stumbled into the apartment hours later, Ronan was bent over a Latin textbook at the kitchen table, mumbling out loud to himself as he struggled to conquer the fifth declension.

 

“Ronan Lynch, studying?” Adam raised his eyebrows. “I thought you’d be sleeping.” Translation, I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with you.

 

Ronan stared at the declension chart spread in front of him, then back to his translation work in progress. The language of heroes, myths, art and love and death. But he couldn’t break or befriend it. “What do you know about ancient Latin, Parrish?”

 

Adam paused, taken aback at the veiled plea for help. “Quite a bit, actually. I studied it for my foreign language requirement last year.”

 

“Look at this bit, would you?” Ronan asked gruffly, waving at his half-completed homework. “I can’t tell if Ulysses is with the Myrmidons or trying to skewer them.”

 

“You mean, it’s all Greek to you?” Adam smiled slightly. Ronan groaned, but his mouth tugged at the corner. 

 

Adam pulled up a chair at the table and fished Ronan’s pencil out of the textbook binding. “Well, this ending has got to be genitive of possession, otherwise you’re trying to match a singular with a plural. And this verb is subjunctive, but you translated it as indicative.” 

 

Ronan watched Adam’s eyebrows furrow as he bent over the translation, all the usual animosity and tension gone from his dust-skinned face as he tackled the puzzle. He’d never noticed the way Adam’s long fingers curled around a pencil, the slight pinkish tinge of the skin on his knuckles, the graceful line of the muscle in his forearm. He thought back to his earlier taunt at Kavinsky. He’d meant it to hurt, not to be true.

 

“What?” Ronan snapped, realizing that Adam had turned to look at him expectantly. The reverie passed like a receding tide, leaving Ronan cold and helpless on the sand.

 

“I asked if you’d learned this verb conjugation yet,” Adam said, bemused. 

 

“Whatever,” Ronan muttered, seizing his pencil back with more force than necessary. “That’s all I needed. You should sleep.”

 

Adam was quiet for a moment, then nodded and rose to his feet. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow, more’s the shame for both of us.”

 

They smiled slightly at each other, wearing their arguments like comfortable old clothes. “Don’t die in the night, Parrish.”

 

“I’ll try not to, Lynch.” Adam paused. “Good luck with the translation. It’s a beautiful passage, do it justice.” He turned and disappeared into the dark of the hallway.

  
Ronan watched him go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Adam and Ronan face their demons.


	4. The Vodka

**Midnight, or After (the apartment)**  
A half-empty handle of vodka rolled across the warped wood of the living room floor. Ronan Lynch crawled devotedly after it, a pilgrim following his gospel.

Cold sweat rolled down his brow as he groped ineffectively for the sloshing bottle. A furnace burned behind his eyes, in his nose, down his throat, like a blowtorch was consuming him from the inside. Ronan’s fingers made contact with the bottle.

For all the careful masonry he’d invested in his do-not-come-hither reputation, all the sneakily downed ales of his childhood when his father would sneak one out for him after dinner, Ronan was actually not much of a drinker. The taste was vile, and truth be told, he had more creative ways to self destruct when he wanted to.

But this was a special occasion.

**9:00 AM (same day)**  
“So how am I doing, on the ‘begging for forgiveness’ meter?” Adam watched Blue devouring the large breakfast parfait he had bought her as tribute as the two walked back towards his apartment. He was eager to repent for leaving her alone with Ronan and Gansey for a full meal the previous week, but Blue had emerged from the episode oddly pensive and not especially cross, a scholar introduced to a challenging new theory.

“Depends. How many more of these things can I squeeze out of your meal plan?” Blue slurped up a stray blueberry, grinning.

Adam stopped mid-step on the sidewalk so abruptly that Blue walked straight into his back. His eyes were fixed on the curb in front of the apartment stairs, where an abysmally colorless pickup truck was parked askew behind the Hybrid.

Blue poked her head around his shoulder, eyes narrowing. “Adam, whose car is that?”

His long fingers clenched involuntarily into a fist.

“My father’s,” he said quietly. “That’s my father’s car.”

**9:00 AM (elsewhere)**  
A miasma of gasoline fumes and road dust clouded the cornfield, pungent and unforgiving. Somewhere in the eerie blur Ronan heard the rev of an engine, the gravel-crunching slide of wheels drifting on unpaved dirt. His own fingers tightened around the steering wheel of the BMW, convulsing.

From the passenger seat, Kavinsky pushed up his sunglasses with a motion like Medusa whisking off a blindfold. “It’s just that little shit Prokopenko out there. Had the nerve to ask to borrow my car, but you gotta admire his pluck, so I gave it to him. Teach him some respect, Lynch.”

Ronan ignored him. He had slept fitfully, engulfed in dreams of sparks which formed themselves into dragons, long hands which twined gently around his, and then the flames again, curling around him in sodium green and unnatural yellows. Throughout the night, the bangs of exploding firecrackers and raucous, mournfully human howls floated up through the bedroom window, as they had several nights of the past week. They brought with them the unwelcome reminder of where exactly Kavinsky was, and what he was doing.

He’d shown up at the apartment that morning, short of an apology but the promise of a race on his tongue. Ronan almost turned him away. Almost.

“The starting line’s over there, asshole,” Kavinsky was egging him on, dilated pupils and sharp incisors more wolf than boy. Ronan stayed still as stone. Calculating. Hesitating.

“So you don’t play with fire, and now you won’t meet the open earth either? Coward. Who the hell are you? You’re sure as Christ not the Ronan Lynch I know.”

Ronan stared Kavinsky in the face, hands white against the wheel. In his mind, he leapt and braced for impact. “I don’t get off on torturing kids like you do, alright? And it sure as hell takes the fun out of a race if you’re going to sit here nagging me like a fucking babysitter.”

Kavinsky held up his palms in mock surrender. “And here I thought we’d kissed and made up! Nobody made you come out here with me if you’re still pissed off.”

Ronan rolled down the driver side window and took in the cackles and howls of the other racers, boiling his blood. “Get out. I don’t take passengers when I race, you know that.”

“What, is the rookie all grown up now? You think you’ve surpassed your master or some shit? I made you.”

Ronan sat in pointed silence. Kavinsky’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck you. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, didn’t your mama tell you that?” He rose and slammed the door on his way out.

The BMW engine roared to life. The car peeled forward.

**Midnight, or After II (the apartment)  
** Adam’s hands were numb, his face was numb, he wished his heart could be more unfeeling. The summer nights were oddly freezing this year, and he’d walked five miles wearing only an old T-shirt and shorts. Over and over again he repeated to himself, I am alone, I am alone. The pickup truck was gone from the curb. Even looking at the empty space where it had been made Adam’s heart pound unsteadily.

Why had his father come? Why now, when he had never made an effort to remember he had a son the entire previous year?

Adam didn’t bother to switch on the light when he stepped into the apartment. The silhouette of Ronan’s shaved head shone faintly in the darkness, his form curled behind the coffee table, an acrid sting of vodka fumes glazing the air. Their eyes, one pair dazed, one pair wide, both pairs bloodshot, met in quiet accord and with a surprising lack of surprise.

“You’re drunk,” Adam said listlessly.

“You’re shaking,” Ronan drawled. Adam realized abruptly that he was. The hairs on his arms all stood at attention, goosebumps of cold covered his skin. He shut the door behind him. With a languid sweep of the arm beloved of drunks everywhere, Ronan grabbed a blanket from the couch and threw it to Adam. He barely raised his arm in time to catch it, startled by the gruff act of kindness.

“Thanks.” Adam wrapped the itchy throw around his shoulders and curled onto the couch, something he had often done as a child in his room, hiding. The motion felt as once comforting and regressive.

“Bad day, Parrish?” Ronan hefted the vodka and proffered it. Adam waved it aside.

“Shit day,” he muttered. And then added, “My father came to see me.” He’d sent Blue away after they saw the car, despite much indignant protesting on her end, with assurances that nothing bad would happen to him. She’d been texting and calling several times an hour since; he hadn’t found the energy to reply with more than a simple confirmation that he was still breathing.

He’d been true to his word. Nothing bad had happened, other than the stifling tension between an angry man and his alienated son as they attempted a mummery of normal conversation. I want to start over, claimed Robert Parrish, I want to be a part of your life again. Torn pieces of Adam howled at each other, let him in keep him out let him in, while his mouth remained stubbornly closed, until the visit had plodded to its own awkward demise. No shouting, no fists, only quiet disappointment on both sides.

His father drove away, and Adam found himself walking, desperate for air, savoring the uncomfortable chill. He hadn’t meant to walk for so long, but the walls of the apartment where his father had so recently held court felt like sudden shackles.

Ronan was silent for some time, so long that Adam thought he might have fallen asleep. “He’s the one who gave you that scar on your ugly mug, huh?” he finally said.

Adam started, fingers automatically touching the puckered mark by his ear where his father had, many years ago, struck him while holding a screwdriver. It had been an accident, the screwdriver but not the blow; he was tinkering with the kitchen table at the time and forgotten he was holding it when the rage began. Or so he’d said, when he apologized haltingly after, unable to look his son in the face.

“Was it so obvious?” Adam asked. Maybe it was because this was Lynch, whose opinion he didn’t give a rat’s ass about, or because he was clearly drunk beyond repair, but the usual burning shame and defensiveness that came with people noticing his scar was absent this time.

Ronan shrugged. “I could read the signs.” A slow slug of vodka, faint coughing. “He’s a real shithead, for doing that to you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Adam said. He was exhausted, the sort of soul-draining exhaustion that made him feel like he could sleep for days and days.

Ronan let out a surprisingly high-pitched hiccup. “Yeah, I’m not much for talking crap out either. Landed me in a bit of a shithole today.”

“And thus, the vodka.”

Ronan nodded. “Vodka.” Another swig. He picked up a curious rubiks cube off the table shaped like a lopsided tetrahedron, and began to toy with it. “I think I dislocated Kavinsky’s shoulder.”

Adam fought back a hysterical laugh. “Jesus, I knew you liked it rough, but…” he trailed off, unsure if the joke rang false.

Ronan’s mouth twitched. “Well, he tends to be more affectionate when I haven’t just T-boned his car. On purpose.”

Adam sucked in air through his teeth. “Lynch.”

Ronan shook his head. “Don’t give me that. I was tired of him acting like he owned me.” He kneaded his forehead with the heels of his hands. “And when he...I was supposed to race Prokopenko, but he cut in at the last minute and tried to show me up in front of all the racers, some kind of sick dominance play. I lost it. And after I tried to break his car, he climbed out and tried to break me.”

Adam really looked at Ronan for the first time, at the dark blossom of a bruise spreading across his jawline, the caked blood on his knuckles as he gripped the bottle. Ronan, noticing his gaze, smiled slightly. “But you should see how he looks, after I was done.”

It was meant to come out flippant, reassuring. But Adam heard the break in Ronan’s voice, the wreckage and despair reminiscent of a highway collision gone up in flames.

Adam was furious, furious at Kavinsky and at the other boys who had let him, watched him, do this to Ronan; filled with a familiar swell of anger that made him feel disgustingly like he was wearing his father’s skin every time it rolled in. The anger eclipsed the dead feeling that had settled in his ribcage after his father left, warming him, steadying him.

Adam briefly thought of Henry’s assignment on the fraternity arsonists, the interview with Kavinsky he had yet to make any move to schedule, the ten unanswered text messages from Noah Czerny the Intern in his cell phone. Just a week ago he’d helped Ronan Lynch with a Latin translation at the dinner table, and now they sat cloistered together in darkness, each wrapped within even darker thoughts of his own.

Adam glanced at the pull-out futon where Gansey had been sleeping, mercifully empty.

“He’s with your tropical bird, at a movie or something,” Ronan answered unasked. “He gets a little cross-eyed every time she comes into a room.”

Adam laughed. “She’s not mine or anybody’s. And I really don’t think he’s her type.”

Ronan shrugged. “He’s not the prick you think he is, you know. He’s always been good to me.” The admission felt like something a sober Ronan wore on his sleeve but had never spoken out loud.

“You’re not really the prick I thought you were, either,” Adam said quietly. “I think I owe you an apology for being an asshole the first couple days.”

Ronan grinned, head lolling slightly. “Well, I appreciate that, Parrish. But I think I’m about to puke, so you might want to profess your love after you’ve considered that.”

Adam groaned and leaned forward to haul Ronan to his feet by the armpits. “In the bathroom, you bastard. Neither of us can afford to lose our security deposit, now that your car insurance premiums are most likely shot to hell.”

Ronan leaned his forehead against Adam’s shoulder and moaned. “Cold. Cold is good.”

Adam stiffened slightly, Ronan’s forehead warm and sticky against his T-shirt. He could feel both their uneven pulses, fast with adrenaline, pounding through their skin. “Bathroom,” he said again, voice less certain. “I’m getting you to the toilet before you blow.”

Ronan smiled, eyes unfocused. “That’s the way, Parrish. That’s the way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Adam gets some advice from Blue.


	5. The Catan

“Nice pen,” Blue commented appreciatively, glancing up from her novel to watch Adam scribbling out a grocery list. “How is it doing that?”

The pen was changing color as Adam wrote without any visible direction from him, color coding the grocery items by food group. “Oh,” Adam distractedly scratched his ear. “It’s actually Ronan’s. There’s multiple inkwells inside the pen, and you can switch them by applying pressure with your thumb back here.” He showed Blue a hidden latch on the underside of the pen barrel. “It must have more than ten colors in here. I’m tempted to take it apart just to see how they all fit.”

Blue smiled slightly. “So now you’re quite literally pen pals with the human disease Ronan Lynch? I told you he was alright.”

“Highly mediocre punning you just performed there. I’d rate it a 5/7.”

“And Kavinsky? He hasn’t shown up since...that day your dad came?”

Adam stilled. Not at the mention of his father, which before had so often jolted him into a sickening state of anxiety, chest squeezing, fingers clammy. But because he realized all of a sudden, he had started thinking of the day his father visited instead as the day he had nursed a vomiting Ronan to sleep on the bathroom floor, the night Ronan had started singing some godawful tune (murder? squash?) between spasms and had Adam on the verge of dunking his head in the toilet. The night they spent awake together under the flickering light of a dying bulb, nothing but two boys and their demons.

“Sorry,” Blue was saying quickly. “We don’t have to talk about him. Honestly if he’s disappeared, good riddance. To both of them.”

“I’m fine,” Adam reassured her, realizing she’d mistaken his reverie for trauma. “Thank you, for keeping track of me that day.”

“Of course. If I don’t have you around anymore, who’s going to get me yogurt parfaits?” Blue grinned and repositioned her book--it was the same wrinkled copy of _The Secret History_ that Gansey had been leafing through the day he’d first appeared on Adam’s couch.

“What do you think of him?” Adam asked abruptly, brought up short at the sight of the novel’s intimately dogeared pages. It seemed like a deeply personal thing, like Gansey had lent Blue a bit of his soul rather than a possession, and watching Blue read it felt like...trespassing.

Blue hummed absentmindedly under her breath. “The author’s actually a woman.”

“No, not that, Gansey.”

Blue laughed and put the book back down in her lap. “He calls me Jane. And he’s stupid about his beaten up orange Camaro. I can imagine him sitting in the driver’s seat, telling girls ‘it’s a metaphor’,” she imitated in a throaty Bond voice. “He’s the most frustrating human being I’ve ever met.”

Adam smiled slightly. “Blue, you’ve been seeing him nearly every day that he’s been here.”

She shrugged. “Frustrating is interesting. Not very sensible, I know, but he’s intriguing. The other day we went to the library and read through an entire book on Welsh kings together, front to back.” The affection in her voice was evident.

“You realize the phenomenon you’re describing is a classic, if rather odd, courtship, Blue Sargent.”

She shrugged, didn’t deny it. “Well, for the first week I actually did think he was an asshole. He’s completely unaware most of the time that he grew up in a world of wealth and privilege, and he could learn a thing or two about modern feminism. And then after I got to know him better, I thought for the next week or two that he and Ronan were together.”

Adam nearly stabbed himself in the hand with his pen. “What?”

Blue glanced at Adam’s hand, which now boasted a long lime green streak of ink across the knuckle. “Gansey looks at Ronan like he’s...I don’t know, an incendiary piece of art? Wild but fragile, needing to be protected. And Ronan looks at Gansey like he’s the only salvation he’ll get in this world. I thought they had something going on.” She crossed her arms.

Gansey and Ronan. Adam swallowed. The idea was unbearable, viscerally uncomfortable. He could see it as if he remembered it, though: Gansey dragging Ronan to school as a kid and covering for him when he failed, the two of them joyriding down wheat-lined highways in the purring BMW, lying in empty cornfields with fingers laced. They would’ve known each others’ families well, broken bread over familiar dining tables since they were young. Practically soulmates. Ronan reckless, hurtling towards life at 90 miles per hour; Gansey measured, charismatic, the moral compass. The sort of bond that Adam had never had with another human being.

He couldn’t compete, not with one night of drunken laughter in a bathroom reeking of vodka and vomit.

“Maybe Gansey will take him off my hands, then,” Adam managed, struggling to keep his voice even. “They seem better suited to be roommates, anyways.”

Blue kept her eyes leveled at Adam. “Adam, it was just a crackpot theory I had. Gansey thinks of him like a brother. And he hasn’t told me because he’s terrible at saying anything affectionate about anyone, but I’d imagine Ronan feels the same way.”

“Ah.” Adam couldn’t manage anything more, staring down blankly at the meticulous grocery list he had completed, clutching Ronan’s pen between his fingers. “I...sorry. I don’t know what just came over me.”

A slow grin was spreading across Blue’s face. “Adam...has it occurred to you that maybe you’re jealous?”

\--

_Please don’t be home. Please don’t be home. Please don’t--_

Adam swung the apartment door open, and Ronan Lynch was lounging shirtless on the couch, a Coca Cola can popped open in one hand. “Parrish,” he said as greeting, eyes still on the TV. It was some episode on the History Channel about an Egyptian excavation site.

“Lynch,” Adam muttered, throwing his keys in the tray by the door. Blue’s words replayed over and over in his mind--has it occurred to you that maybe you’re jealous? Adam shook his head and turned hastily towards the kitchen.

“You’re red,” Ronan called from the sofa, taking a long swig of his soda. “Not wearing sunscreen doesn’t make you a badass.”

Adam touched his face self-consciously. No sunburn. He...was he blushing now, too? This was utterly ridiculous. He needed to clear his head. Or a cold beer, to muddle his head more. After a moment’s consideration, Adam opted for the beer.

Ronan sauntered into the kitchen, crushing his coke can in one hand. “Listen...I wanted to say thanks,” he said haltingly, rubbing the nape of his neck. “For the other night. Usually I just take care of myself when I get shitfaced, but it was nice to have somebody else with me.”

Adam looked down at his long fingers, wrapped around his beer bottle with increasing intensity, unsure of what to say. “Don’t worry about it,” he managed after a moment of silence. “I needed somebody to stay with me too.”

When he glanced up to meet Ronan’s gaze, he realized that Ronan had been staring at the beer bottle too. No, not the bottle. At his hands.

\--

“Would anybody care to give me some rocks for this herd of sheep?” Gansey glanced around the dining table. Blue and Adam solemnly shook their heads; Ronan gave him the finger.

“Nobody needs a fucking sheep, Gansey,” Ronan growled.

The four of them were clustered together on the apartment floor. Adam had just picked up Settlers of Catan for a bargain purchase at the library, and after some groaning (Blue), some mild questioning about the realism of establishing a trading economy with only four goods (Gansey) and some “well, the food network’s shit tonight, so we might as well” (Ronan), the game was forty-five minutes underway.

Out of generosity Adam had even invited Henry and Noah by text, but both had declined. Henry was apparently going to a rally protesting the student protests on campus, which seemed ridiculously counterproductive and metaphysical to Adam; Noah had given no excuse but seemed too frightened at the prospect of spending an evening with four relative strangers for Adam to push the invite.

Gansey placed the robber baron casually onto one of Ronan’s most lucrative spaces. “You’ll rue the day you denied me those rocks,” he said solemnly.

Adam reached inside his bag of pieces and triumphantly placed a new house onto the board, taking the last resourceful plot. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he grinned.

“Hang on, Parrish, you can upgrade that other house to a settlement,” Ronan reached across the board and plucked one of Adam’s former pieces off. He dropped it back into Adam’s palm, fingertips grazing his skin for a fragment of a second too long. Blue glanced back and forth between the two of them, a satisfied look on her face.

“What the hell, Lynch, you’ll help him out but hang me out to dry?” Gansey complained.

“My house, my rules,” Ronan grinned ferally, offering a fist for Adam to bump.

Adam smiled slightly and returned the bump. “Team collaboration to make a monopoly? I could be into that.”

Blue and Gansey huffed indignantly at the same time. Ronan’s grin stretched wider.

Adam felt as if there was a small sun swelling inside his chest, warm and bright. All the earlier anxiety, anger, (jealousy) of the day had fallen away, leaving behind only this happiness on the floor of his ramshackle home. He had not felt so content in a very long time.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Adam gets a tour of the Museum of Lynch Oddities.


	6. The Collection

“How does that thing work, Lynch?”

 

Ronan was lying on the living room floor with his arms in the air, working on the odd tetrahedral rubix cube he often fiddled with when he was bored. Adam had been trying to do homework, but found himself watching Ronan twist the puzzle in spatially unreasonable ways, the pieces bending like broken bones, its inner axes completely unfathomable.

 

“Not sure. Nobody’s ever managed to solve it but me,” Ronan said, a hint of backdoor brag in his voice. “Try it.” He tossed the puzzle to Adam, who tried hard to catch it nonchalantly but instead fumbled and hit himself in the chin.

 

The toy was very dense in his palms, and all the individual pieces were shaped differently--parallelograms and trapezoids and odd undefined polygons that nevertheless slid against each other with ease when Adam pushed. The puzzle must have been packed full of gears intricate as spiderwebs.

 

Ronan watched Adam become engrossed with the pieces, observed his dust-colored mouth turning downward as he assembled the red side of the pyramid. Parrish was getting the hang of it much faster than anybody Ronan had shown the cube to, including Gansey. “If you like it, I’ve got loads more stuff that’ll blow your mind.”

 

Ronan knew that Adam still had the pen with the impossibly large amount of inkwells, that he used it when he thought Ronan wasn’t looking. It didn’t matter, Ronan didn’t particularly want it back, he didn’t have the patience for color coding or neat handwriting. Adam, on the other hand, religiously scrawled out everything on paper, an analog man. He wrote post-its and left them on the fridge where most people would have sent a text, and typically kept an embarrassing heap of scrap paper in his pockets with dates, reminders and professors’ email addresses. Sometimes (when he thought Ronan had gone to sleep), Adam wrote half-finished short stories and free form poetry with lots of abrupt stops and  treatises on anything from modern politics to analyses of ancient Roman myths. The sheer amount of thinking that Adam did, the way he craved information like a marooned islander dreamt of clear water, was fascinating to Ronan.

 

Adam glanced up from the rubix cube. “You’re finally going to explain the Museum of Oddities sitting in your room?”

 

Ronan’s eyes narrowed. “It’s my father’s stuff. I just take care of it now.”

 

“Ah.” Adam’s eyebrows furrowed. “Is he…”

 

“Alive,” Ronan said. “He does business in Ireland, ever since I was a little kid. I see him about once a year.”

 

“You miss him,” Adam stated. It was clear in the way Ronan spoke, his adoring tone like every other child who thought their father akin to a god. Adam swallowed hard. What he would give, to have only seen his father once a year growing up. His fondest memories were the weekends Robert Parrish drove out of town to visit his brother and stayed away overnight. They were the nights a small Adam had slept sound instead of cowering as he waited for heavy footfalls to stop at his door.

 

“He’s not much of a family man, but not because he doesn’t love us. Jesus, he loves my mother a little too much, if you ask me,” Ronan snorted. “But...well, I’ll show you what he does.”

 

Adam followed Ronan down the hall to his room, where Chainsaw the raven greeted _kerah_ from under the bed. It was odd that Adam now considered a pet raven named after an electric tool to be an endearing choice.

 

Adam had been in Ronan’s room a handful of times, mostly to ask him to put on headphones when he was listening to his Irish folk music at top volume, but he’d never really stayed long enough to inspect the rows of lovingly kept souvenirs which lined his bookshelves. Ronan had two ceiling height shelves on either side of his bed, each filled with items as carefully curated as a museum display.

 

“My father deals in specialty antiques and toys,” Ronan explained, looking at Adam for a reaction. “Family business, really, my dickhead older brother moved to Dublin to help him out full time after he graduated. Usually it’s shit profits, but occasionally you happen on something that a rich bastard in England or Wales really wants, and that’s what’s keeping the store running.” He went around the bed and placed the rubix cube in its slot on the left bookshelf, leaving Adam to peruse the right.

 

“So he sends all these to you as gifts?” Adam glanced at Ronan for permission, and picked up a ship in a bottle that appeared to be made entirely from differently sized needles. Carefully he turned the bottle to look at how the silvery vessel glinted at different angles. The workmanship was incredible.

 

“More or less. These are things that stay on the shelves too long but he can’t bear to give away, or sometimes things that he says remind him of me. A few are birthday gifts, when he couldn’t make it.” Ronan pulled down a little replica of a fluffy brown cow, a mundane thing compared to the rest of the wonders, but his eyes softened when he held it. “This one was from after one of the cows on our farm died calving. I was seven and I cried like a baby. Her name was Rose.”

 

Adam blinked in surprise. “Your family owns a farm, too?”

 

Ronan Lynch, car-racing punk, son of bizarre antiques dealer, and now farmboy. It was difficult to reconcile. Adam thought of the epithets he owned in comparison--Adam Parrish, scholarship boy, wannabe journalist, human encyclopedia. Abuse survivor. He wondered if it made him equally worthwhile. Briefly he thought of Ronan’s fingertips in his palm as they exchanged pieces in Settlers of Catan.

 

“The farm is my grandparents’, my mom’s parents. I grew up on it. Since my dad was away so much we never really moved out. There was jackshit to do for miles and in the summer I nearly sweat my balls off, but…” Ronan shrugged. “It’s home. Sometimes the moon was so big it was like it could swallow you. And…”

 

“Sometimes you could see all the constellations at night, even the ones that you don’t know the names of, and it makes you think about your place in the universe,” Adam said quietly. Ronan raised his eyebrows. “I grew up in the country, too. In a trailer park, so a little different. Everything was dust and wheat and the locals were pretty damn racist...but I forgot all that at night. It was like you could dip your fingers straight into the sky.”

 

Adam wasn’t used to waxing poetical, at least not out loud, and when he did it was usually a way to vent the seething anger that spilled from his hands at late hours of night. It was a way to cope. But here he was, talking about the moon and stars with Ronan Lynch, for no other reason than their shared admiration of a beauty greater than themselves.

 

Self-consciously Adam went back to browsing the shelf, and began to fiddle with a box that appeared to translate words into dead languages. He was aware of Ronan’s eyes on his neck, on his hands.

 

“Damn it, I think I jammed the cypher,” Adam muttered, jiggling one of the letters on the English side of the box.

 

“Not like that. I’ll show you,” Ronan vaulted over the bed to sit on the edge, and reached for the box. Adam made to hand it over, but Ronan firmly clasped his hands over Adam’s, keeping them in place over the cyphers. “Push counterclockwise with this one,” Ronan instructed softly, applying pressure to guide Adam’s fingers. “It’s old, sometimes the gears are stubborn.”

 

Ronan’s palms were full of callouses, some torn open like craters, others peppering the the base of his fingers. Adam’s heart beat against his bones like fists raining down on a prison door, so violent he thought it would tear its way through. All he could think was, _Blue was right. I’m jealous. I’m jealous._ He could not bear the thought that Ronan’s palms had been on Kavinsky just like this. Jesus, he did not want Ronan Lynch to touch anybody else ever again.

 

They were so close, Ronan sitting with his elbows resting over his legs as he calibrated the wood box, Adam standing between Ronan’s knees, arms loosely outstretched and curled hands less than a foot from Ronan’s mouth. Impossibly Ronan was still trying to spell something with the box, calm and methodical as he guided Adam’s fingers. Adam did not remember what calm was.

 

“Got it.” Ronan lifted his hands to show Adam the word he had spelled; Adam’s heart screamed at the absence of his skin, wanted that sparking warmth back and could not care less if he was holding the rosetta stone itself in his hands if it meant Ronan was letting go. With difficulty, he looked down at the box: STAR, read the english side. On the left, STELLA; on the right, an odd cyrillic-looking script Adam didn’t recognize.

 

“‘But now damp night hurries from sky to sea, and the falling stars persuade sleep’,” Adam quoted softly. “Book Two of the Aeneid.” The line of poetry grounded him, stopped his mind from spinning long enough to breathe.

 

Ronan reached silently for the box with both hands, and for the second time Adam made to hand it to him. Ronan accepted the box with his left hand, set it on the bed. But his right twined gently around Adam’s wrist, still and sure, and cradled the back of his hand. His eyes were bright as an eclipse.

 

“Adam,” Ronan said, voice rough. He had not been calm after all, not with the way he was looking up at Adam now. Adam shivered. He hadn’t known his name could sound like that.

 

In an underwater movement slow as dreaming, Adam raised his hands to Ronan’s face and caged it questioningly between his fingers. Ronan stared back in unflinching challenge, his pulse wild against Adam’s fingers. Slowly Adam ran his thumb over Ronan’s bottom lip, chapped and cracked. Ronan’s eyes closed. He turned his face into Adam’s palm and pressed his mouth against the salty skin.

 

“Alright, Lynch,” Adam said. He leaned down at the same time Ronan’s arms pulled him in by the waist, and then he was kissing Ronan. It scattered Adam’s thoughts like shrapnel flying out of his brain, flooded his throat with the swell of stars and stream of electricity as searing as vodka. He did not care if he was jealous or if he was out of his mind. He forgot his father, forgot Blue, forgot his three jobs and pending financial aid and the pile of homework left forgotten on his desk. All that was left was Ronan, and Adam Parrish was at peace.

 

Ronan’s eyes closed, head tipped back in reckless abandon. Brilliant, angry, gentle Adam Parrish. Adam with demons worse than his, Adam who thought about everything too much. Adam’s smell, pencil dust and fresh grass and laundry detergent, filling Ronan’s nose, intoxicating as smoke. Ronan wondered how he had ever thought he’d kissed anybody before this; he wondered how he’d stomached Kavinsky under this roof for weeks while Adam was there all along, a question and an answer.

 

When they came up for air a minute or an hour later, Adam gasped out a laugh, forehead still pressed against Ronan’s. “Blue was right,” he grinned. “Kavinsky was a bastard, but I was jealous of him for getting to do that.”

 

Ronan smirked wide. “Prove her right again, Parrish. You know you want to.”

 

Adam did.

 

 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: the Happily Ever After(s), or, Adam gets published.


	7. The Happy Ending

“Hurry up, would you?” Adam groaned, sprawling back on Ronan’s bed in a pile of dented moving boxes. “We were supposed to go eat an hour ago, shithead.”

Ronan was carefully packing away each piece of memorabilia from his bedroom shelves. At Adam's complaint he smirked and deliberately slowed down his movements, exaggerating each polish he gave the paperweight he was holding. “What’s wrong with a late lunch, Parrish? You got somewhere to be?”

The floor was swallowed with gaping cardboard containers overflowing with blankets, clothing, books and a couple hastily taped-shut food containers. Chainsaw squawked unhappily from where she was caged atop the dresser, ready for transport. One week before classes resumed, and it was time for Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish to move out of their makeshift apartment.

Adam flipped Ronan the finger. “Some of us have to visit the financial aid office in a hour to make a deal with the devil, or the counselor, whichever one is easier. And some of us would prefer to have sustenance before said encounter.” Adam pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, blacking out the humidity and whirls of dust suffocating the apartment air. He didn’t mention the long-awaited article he still had to run over to Henry, or the term paper he needed to trim by a full two pages by midnight.

Ronan’s hands closed over Adam’s and pulled them away from his face and over his head. Adam opened his eyes. Ronan’s silhouette leaned easily over him, eclipsing the light from the window, warmth pouring from his skin.

Ronan laughed. “You look like the fucking goddess of easter right now.” It was true--Adam was lying in pile of pastel colored packing pellets, as well as several loose spools of ribbon and a half-eaten pack of Reese’s Pieces scattered across Ronan’s bedsheets. His hair was mussed in wild grassy disarray, eyes bleary and half closed from being pressed shut a moment ago.

Ronan’s chest clenched with adrenaline. It was the sensation of pulling the BMW into a drift and his stomach temporarily disconnecting from his body. Looking at Adam sprawled in his bed, close enough to feel the rise and fall of his chest through his ratty Coca Cola T-shirt. It was more joyously life-threatening than any speed race.

Ronan leaned down slightly. Adam’s shoulders tensed. Ronan paused, thought for the thousandth time _Jesus he doesn’t want this, shithead, leave him alone leave him alone_ and abruptly tried to pull back. He wasn’t going to take it personally. He wasn’t.

Adam’s long fingers caught Ronan’s before they could fully disengage, almost frantic. “No, I--stay. Sorry.” _I’m sorry that touching people makes me flinch. I’m sorry I never expect you to touch me like you would never hurt me._

Ronan swallowed hard, slowly leaned back over Adam and propped his weight on an elbow. Most of the time it was easy to give Parrish sass, rile him up, challenge his smartass mouth. But when Adam was like this, vulnerable and honest, Ronan Lynch was powerless. He couldn’t do anything about his embarrassing need to hold Adam, to reassure him of his devotion. The feelings tore at Ronan from the inside like claws and talons. Fuck, it was disgusting.

“You apologize too much,” Ronan said quietly. Carefully he tucked his face into the warm hollow between Adam’s jaw and collarbone, pressed his cracked lips against the pulse that beat under his salty skin. Adam shivered, but this time in pleasure.

Adam reached up and turned Ronan’s face toward his, running his thumb across one dark eyebrow. “You should be the one apologizing, Lynch. Now we don’t have time for food and we’ll have to microwave that shit burrito you made last night.”

“It was a bloody excellent burrito, Parrish, you snob.”

“The filling is Easy Mac and peanut butter!”

“So I got all the essential food groups,” Ronan growled, irritation fading as Adam’s fingers reached around to caress the back of his neck. “Stop worrying about the financial aid,” he said abruptly. “The administration is shot to hell, but you’ve faced down worse things. Nothing stands between Adam Parrish and his quality Virginian education.”

Adam snorted. “It’s an easy reassurance to make when your pockets are bottomless. You don’t even go to the classes you shell out full tuition for.” It was meant to be a light-hearted jab, but bitterness leaked into Adam’s voice, a brooding resentment towards the ease with which Ronan and Gansey’s ilk threw around bills like they weighed nothing at all.

Ronan had offered, several times and in explicit terms, to pay off Adam’s student loan debt for him. Adam knew he meant it, that the sum would be pocket change for Ronan, that he was doing it out of misplaced chivalrous intent; Ronan knew Adam would refuse the offer, that it would cost him something more than simple debt if he let Ronan have this boon on him. Briefly, the familiar argument replayed in silence between them. Ronan respected Adam’s stubborn dignity too much to push it again; Adam knew this.

Ronan’s eyes were serious. “Someday you’re going to win a Nobel Prize or a Pullitzer, and then we can roll around in a pile of your own cash if you want. Nothing like financial aid is going to stand in your way.”

Adam stared up at Ronan, this avenging valkyrie of conviction, invested so deeply in the schooling of another boy he’d met two months ago while he himself seldom graced the inside of a lecture hall. Ronan was right. Knowledge, information, education were Adam’s only weapons in a world that had named him penniless. He would keep killing himself with three jobs year after year if it meant crawling out of his hellhole with a degree in hand, without the help of anybody who dared to pity him.

And Adam understood Ronan, too--how school was not and had never been important to what defined the stuff of a Lynch, that Ronan would forge his way through the world with fire and sheer spitting willpower as his father had before him and emerge from the devastation victorious. Ronan would carve out his legacy without the guidebook of a college degree, and he would crack open the world with his bare hands to wring out whatever it could offer him. As life philosophies went, Ronan’s was brave, and reckless, and the stuff of dreams.

Wordlessly, Adam ran his fingers up Ronan’s back, under his shirt, tracing the fine lines of his tattoo. Ronan’s eyes closed, his breath ragged. Forty-five minutes til the financial aid appointment. They were done talking for now.

\--

“Cheng.”

Adam threw a thinly clipped pile of handwritten pages onto Henry’s editorial desk, triumphant. “I wrote you that editorial article you’ve been thirsting for. You can use it to flesh out the August edition or frame it on your wall, up to you.”

Henry twisted around from his computer, quickly minimizing the League of Legends window that had been open. He picked up the sheath of notes, squinting as he thumbed through them. “You couldn’t be bothered to type this up like a normal person?” he complained.

“Noah can transcribe it,” Adam shrugged. “He’s bored to death anyways.”

“I’m actually devising a new win-all strategy to Solitaire,” Noah called from over the divide of his cubicle. “I’m very busy.”

Henry began to rapidly skim through the pages. “This isn’t about Kavinsky and the arsons.”

“It’s not,” Adam said agreeably.

“This is, in fact, some Breakfast Club plagiarism,” Henry’s eyebrows were rising rapidly towards the threatening spike of his hair. He kept reading. “You’ve got the delinquent Lynch, the golden boy Gansey, weirdo Blue, nerdy Parrish...who does that make the princess, me or Noah?”

“Who says it can’t be both?” Adam smiled thinly. “I actually didn’t plagiarize anything from the Breakfast Club. The piece is thematically similar, yes, but the rest you’re just making up.”

Henry finished the article and sat back. “I do have to admit, it’s a tearjerker. A summer spent hating a roommate, then learning about the travails of friendship surpassing social and economic boundaries, and ending in a love story…” He grinned. “I didn’t know you were gay, Parrish.”

“Bisexual, actually,” Adam hefted his backpack. “Will it do?”

“I think it will,” Henry mused thoughtfully. “Good end of summer vibes, meeting the people you least expect to become your friends in college, very sap. The freshmen who actually read the school paper are sure to eat it up.” He sighed deeply. “Gone are the days when articles about the political issues that matter sold copy.”

Adam saluted ironically and waved Noah a quick goodbye. “In that case, I’ve got to head out to the airport. The golden boy is leaving today.”

-

“Take care of him, alright?” Gansey whispered in Adam’s ear as he clasped him in a goodbye hug. “Try to make him go to class, sometimes.”

They were back at the airport, the place where stories came full circle, and Gansey’s flight back to Princeton was due to depart in less than an hour. Adam and Ronan stood a respectful distance away; Blue was holding a water bottle in one hand and reached to take Gansey’s fingers with the other. “I suppose this is farewell for a while, Jane,” Gansey said formally, chipper in the suave way he was always pretending to be, but his eyes spelt out the truth of his hesitation.

“I’ll keep my ear to the ground about the Welsh king,” Blue smiled. Gansey smiled back.

“My mom already misses you. She’s never had anybody else try to eat her cooking so valiantly,” Blue added.

Gansey grimaced slightly. “It wasn’t...so bad.”

“Liar.” Blue stood on her toes and gently kissed Gansey on the mouth. His hand reached up to hold her there for a second. It seemed for a moment as if something calamitous would happen--a lightning strike, or a sinkhole perhaps--but it passed, and it was just Blue and Gansey, blushing and sad.

Ronan cleared his throat. “Well, if you’re done with him, Maggot, we ought to get going. The parking’s going to expire.”

Gansey and Ronan clasped each other in a surprisingly tender hug, and then he was going through the gates, glancing back once before disappearing into the throng. Blue sighed and linked arms with Ronan and Adam. “Alright, boys. Let’s go home.”

-

At night, under the lopsided gibbous moon, Ronan and Adam drove the BMW out onto the open road, until the whole earth was one straight cut of asphalt shearing through the rustle of golden corn.

Ronan stopped the car at the roadside, and they clambered out to sit on the hood of the car, metal still cooling beneath their skin.

“Meet your new roommate yet?” Ronan asked, staring up into the deepening sky. Once, he had known the names of all the constellations, pointing up at them with his small hand in Niall Lynch’s. The knowledge was lost to him now, but the stars were still the same relentlessly beautiful ones he’d named as a child.

Adam shook his head, leaning his head back against the windshield. “Did you?”

“I’ve got my own room, but there’s a crazy named Orla in the other one. She thinks she communes with spirits.” Ronan glanced at Adam’s hands, long fingers curled on the hood of the car, glanced back away.

Adam saw him looking. He reached across the sliver of space between them and laced his fingers through Ronan’s, nonchalant, though both of them felt the quickening of their pulses. “I’ll miss this,” Adam said quietly. “I’ll...miss you.”

“I’ll be two blocks away, jackass,” Ronan said, but his voice was just as soft. Adam reflected that Ronan Lynch was the only person he knew who could make “jackass” sound like another person’s “sweetheart”. “Did you get your money?” Ronan asked abruptly.

It took Adam a second to realize Ronan meant the financial aid meeting. The appointment seemed like a decade ago. “I did get my money,” Adam exhaled, an anvil lifted from his shoulders. “Full scholarship this year. I don’t owe a penny.”

Ronan’s grin was feral in the darkness. “I told you.”

“Doesn’t benefit a person to get cocky,” Adam shrugged, smiling back. They settled back into comfortable silence, gazing up at the stars. A minute later Ronan turned, carefully observed the line of Adam’s neck, his nose, the illumination of a thousand celestial bodies reflected in his eyes.

“Adam?”

Ronan pressed his lips to the corner of Adam’s surprised mouth, tasting sweetness. He trembled with restraint. He would be courteous. He would wait for Adam to cross whatever boundaries he had set, if he chose to cross them at all.

Adam reached for Ronan, and kissed him, warm and with purpose. Ronan closed his eyes, letting a happiness rich as honey drip luxuriously through his chest. God, he would dream this moment every night til the day he died. But he didn’t want to sleep, he wanted to remember, he wanted to be kissing Adam.

“Jesus,” Ronan gasped when they broke apart, grinning. “Who knew you had that in you, Parrish?”

In answer, Adam pulled Ronan over on top of him with one unexpectedly smooth motion, his hands pulling Ronan down for another long kiss. They were in danger of denting the BMW, they were about to get bitten by mosquitoes in a million uncomfortable places. They did not care.

Tomorrow the world started again, and classes rolled on. Adam would uncharacteristically daydream through his international diplomacy lecture, Blue would join him for lunch and with one knowing glance at his bruised mouth learn the entire story of what had transpired the night prior. Ronan would wake with Adam’s smell on his sheets, groggy and delirious, glad for the sign that it hadn’t all been a glorious dream.

But tonight they were just two boys and a BMW under the moon, soft and warm and wonderfully sure of only each other. It was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is the end. Thank you to everybody who joined me on my sudden plunge back into the depths of fanfiction hell. Honestly, every time I think I'm over Pynch I'm not. 
> 
> Til next time!


End file.
